Tuesday, September 21, 2010

From the garden

Today I picked a big bowl each of carrots, cherry tomatoes, and string beans from our vegetable garden.
This is about the fourth bowl of green beans and the second batch of carrots we've gotten from the very small patches I sowed- each only about one square yard's worth of garden space.
We've had lots of cherry tomatoes for several weeks now, but tomatoes are winding down. The single large tomato in the photo is our last of the large tomatoes- we've had a drought and the tomato vines are giving up the ghost.
The carrot variety is "Royal Chatenay", a short fat carrot. I like the shorter carrots since I don't have to dig eight or nine inches down to loosen the soil when sowing the seed. Instead, five inches with a garden fork will do them nicely. I probably should have pulled these carrots when they were smaller, but I was busy with other things. Some of the carrots were one and a half inches thick! They taste wonderful anyway, like all fresh grown carrots do.
The green bean is a Blue Lake bush type. I like the bush beans rather than pole beans for my situation- they won't grow in a tall climbing shape that might block the sun from other plants. My protected vegetable garden space is not limitless, so I have to plan carefully.
We'll be having carrots and green beans with mashed potatoes for dinner the next couple of nights.
The large single flower is Tithonia, or Mexican sunflower. A friend gave me three tiny seedlings of it. The plant gets quite big and has large showy bright orange flowers. This stem blew over in the wind and broke so I put the flower in a glass of water.

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